House of Sand and Fog

I spent an hour and a half at the Oceanside pier yesterday and made a little time-lapse video of the pier, the sand, the water and the sky. I used my new 10.5mm fisheye lens to capture the action. The only problem with this is that everything becomes much smaller than they normally appear.

Another minor problem with this is that the video took in a lot of action that is hard to see all at once.

There are the people going up and down the pier. There's really not much you get to see there...just people moving back and forth.

The clouds turned out pretty well. The fisheye lens captured their movement across a very wide field and it kind of makes them look like they're swirling around the center of the view. That's fun.

The waves turned out OK. With six seconds between shots there isn't a lot of continuity there.

There aren't a lot of people on the beach. It was cool, cloudy and windy. There are joggers. There are a couple of people poking around the rocks at the lower right and around the pier's legs. I think they were harvesting mussels or something. And there's an occasional child who has to dig in the sand.

About halfway through, a couple with their baby park their stroller in the middle of the view and stay there till the end of the video. I kept hoping they'd leave because I thought I had taken enough pictures to get a idea of what this sort of scene would look like. But I didn't want to just cut it off while they were still a prominent feature of the scene. They were taking turns with a skimboard. The father never got it to glide. Once he stepped on it it would dig into the sand and stop. The mother had a little better luck. Kind of. She'd glide a little way then fall into the water. At least she got the board to do some gliding with her on it.

They finally packed up and left. Once they got out of sight I stopped and packed up. It was cold and windy and I had had enough.

I wanted to use the same exposure for all of the shots. Since the camera was going to point toward the sun and the clouds would hide and expose the sun, I didn't wan to use any of the automatic settings. That would make the pictures get dark when the sun was exposed and it would get too light when the sun went behind thick clouds. So I took a shot in an automatic mode with the camera pointing away from the sun and used the exposure it ended up with for the video.

Here is the video made from 1/800^th second exposures at f/14. The shots were taken every six seconds from 10:40 till 12:06. They're played at a rate of 10 frames per second. That lets you see each minute of real time pass each second.



I'm looking forward to doing this when the weather is nice and with an extreme tide. Crowds and rising water will be a good combination.